Peter Greenaway's new film is an explicitly, almost pedantically erotic court masque for the cinema, and an attempt to fuse the early modern aesthetic of the 16th century with the 21st-century medium of digital film. It continues this director's idiosyncratic critical engagement with fine art and the masterpieces of the Renaissance. No one else could have made this film – a fascinating and somewhat heart-sinking realisation. All Greenaway's familiar mannerisms are there: the extravagantly theatrical speeches, delivered square on to camera, and the painterly compositions, faces lit from below, often through a Hockneyesque wobble of water. (But what water? Where is this water?) Entire speeches and scenes pass with the principals going weirdly round and round on a turning wooden platform-stage, perhaps to create the impression of movement in a very static scene. Yet there is a strange urgency to this film that I haven't seen from Greenaway in a long time.

It is based on the life of Dutch painter and printer Hendrick Goltzius (played by Dutch author Ramsey Nasr), who is imagined attempting to persuade his patron, the Margrave of Alsace (a vigorous, sanguine F Murray Abraham), to underwrite a new deluxe edition of the Old Testament with erotic illustrations, including ones of Lot and his daughters, David and Bathsheba, and others. Goltzius also has a troupe of actors who will perform these great scriptural erotic moments for the margrave, to inspire him to pay up. But these sexualised dramas of seduction and betrayal trigger unanticipated emotional reactions in the margrave. What we are seeing is the birth of the modern: modern media, publishing and communications. And sex is driving it, just as it drove movies, video and the internet. Greenaway's utter uniqueness as a film-maker is unarguable.